Best Mac OS X Apps for Web Designers

Mac users and Mac developers/Designers work quite differently as compared to their Windows or Linux counterparts. Building a website on Mac OS X is an all-together different experience. Mac OS X is quite popular platform for web designers and those who work on Mac machines know how it feels to work on this fabulous platform. Credit goes to the vast range of software for designing, managing, developing, and publishing the websites. Apart from the basic web-design, a Mac OS web designer needs lot of other stuff.

Here I am providing a list of my favourite and best Mac OS Apps for web designers. List contains my top 10 and may or may not be complete as far as your requirements are concerned. However, let us see if at least one or more head(s) matches your requirements.

First, any web designer would need an integrated environment that is user friendly and robust at the same time. Coda answers the need. It is the best, integrated web design environment for Mac OS and has robust CSS tools, one click publishing, and facilities like live previews.

iWeb is a simple and easy to use editor that is capable of creating wonderful and effective websites. It is bundled with iLife and has more advanced feature than Coda. It has intuitive interface and features that makes the life of a web designer damn easy. However, I wish to see more templates in future.

Well this one can be the undisputed favourite for visual web design apps of yours. Hundreds of themes and extensive help and support make it quite popular choice. Sometimes, I find it bit complex when I just want to perform a simple task.

When you want to add life to a simple, boring image, you would need Picturesque. Using this superb app, you can add reflections, borders, shadows, and curves to any picture. It will give the image a completely new dimension.

This one is one my favourite text editor for Mac OS. Do not go by its simple and easy interface, it clearly proves that simple is stronger. It saves hell lot of time due to its auto complete feature and we all know time is money.

I many times have struggled with my videos while working for some websites. Then I tried Handbrake. A good convertor converts all your videos into the web format. Best part is, it is completely free and can convert almost any format.

It is not free but is resourceful when you want to use screencast on your website. It provides the facility of recording all the screens/webcams and audios and provides several editing features to innovate and create good stuff.

Keeping versions of your work is important to keep a track of your milestones and changes. This app is a wonderful subversion app that helps you for the same. It is not required that you are a technical person, rather this app makes the versioning process quite easy for a non-technical designer too.

There is an app called Querious that is a full featured DB manager. However, it works only with MySQL5. Hence, if you are working with that then its fine else Sequel Pro is a good and reliable alternative. It is absolutely free and easy-to-use app.

Any designer who works hard would necessarily need a backup app to save his/her hard work. Dropbox is one such app that keeps an off-site backup of your crucial files and documents of your website. It also has the synchronization feature that can help in keeping different computers in sync.

Well, there is a plethora of apps when you start looking seriously for your Mac OS and I am sure you would get plenty of those that are handy, reliable, and fun to use. However, it all depends upon your requirement as a designer and that is why no two designers can have same requirements or interests. Sometimes it is budget, sometimes it is the website model or design or the purpose that decides what app you should have on your machine. In addition, many times the level of technical knowledge of the designer decides about the app he will use.

However, as a Mac user one thing is sure that you would love a user-friendly, intuitive, and easy-to-use application. I would advise to try these software(s) at least once and look for the app world for more. Hence, keep exploring and use the best.